Lecture 4: Should daughters receive the same training as sons?
Once when the question arose as
to whether or not sons and daughters ought to be given the same education, he
remarked that trainers of horses and dogs make no distinction in the training
of the male and the female; for female dogs are taught to hunt just as the
males are, and one can see no difference in the training of mares, if they are
expected to do a horse's work, and the training of stallions.
In the case of man, however, it
would seem to be felt necessary to employ some special and exceptional training
and education for males over females, as if it were not essential that the same
virtues should be present in both alike, in man and woman, or as if it were
possible to arrive at the same virtues, not through the same, but through
different instruction.
By the
time I was sent to school, the powers that be just took it for granted that one
should mix boys and girls together in the classroom, and go about treating them
in much the same way. This was not necessarily the case in my parents’ time, however,
and certainly not in the days of my grandparents and great-grandparents. We
quickly forget that through much of history sons and daughters might be raised
very differently, and receive quite varying degrees of schooling.
I was
always an odd fellow, and cut from a rather different cloth, so my own
experiences will hardly reflect the mood of the times, but it never occurred to
me that boys and girls were somehow members of separate species, or that either
one was any better than the other.
Nevertheless,
I did notice that their temperaments could be quite contrasting, and I observed
that, whether by nature or by custom, they still grew up to often keep their
own company. In kindergarten, they at first played together, but by middle
school, most of the boys would gather at one end of the schoolyard, and most of
the girls at the other. In high school the division became a bit less obvious,
and they flirted, showed off to one another, or sat together at lunch, but you
could still cut the tension with a knife.
How
important was this? Was it just a matter of preference, or was their some
deeper principle behind it all? Were most of us just blindly following the
herd, or were we expressing some basic human distinction? Did someone tell us
to do it, or was it something we desperately needed to do?
Again, I
was rarely a part of either of those big crowds at opposite ends of the
playground, and I usually ran around with another small group, composed of boys
and girls alike, who explored in the woods, collected interesting rocks, and
told fantastical stories. Most every day the teacher would blow her whistle to
keep us from straying too far. Those are quite honestly the friends I now miss
the most, the ones I wish I still knew, in the hope that we might still be
kindred spirits like we once were.
One of
the usual bruisers, a fellow I now imagine works as a successful corporate
lawyer, would tease me constantly about one of my companions being my
girlfriend.
“No,” I stuttered.
“She’s just my good friend.”
“Don’t
be so stupid! You can’t be friends with a girl! There’s only one reason to like
a girl, and she’s way too ugly for that!” It would not surprise me at all if he
still thinks that way.
It
seemed telling to me that the folks filled with the most malice and spite, even
at such an early age, were the first to build walls between the sexes, just as
they also do between races and classes. Yes, of course, boys and girls were
different, and we were sometimes quite confused by our respective instincts,
but what was any of that compared to having someone to talk to, to share your
ideas with, to simply enjoy the company of another soul?
Years
later, when I got pulled kicking and screaming into the life of being a
teacher, I started hearing all sorts of grand theories about how it might be
best to keep boys and girls separated at school, and to teach them in radically
different ways. For a brief time, it was quite trendy to be reactionary in this
regard. Such suggestions could come from all parts of the ideological spectrum,
but they were usually grounded on the assumption that the divide between men
and women was just too great to overcome.
“They
think differently, they feel differently, they have completely distinct needs.
They aren’t going to live their lives in the same way, so we shouldn’t teach
them the same things.”
This
confused me. I can express it all a bit more abstractly now, of course, but I
thought back to the experience of my own childhood. Where was I to draw the line
between a shared humanity and these distinctions between male and female? Some
people seemed to offer only all-or-nothing options, the whole at the expense of
the parts, or the parts at the expense of the whole.
Weren’t
the parts supposed to exist within the whole?
Written in 5/1999
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